Section Chairs: Yuri Van Hoef & Noa Swisa

Through studying the various ways actors in IR construct friendship(s) and achieve positive peace, our section challenges dominant narratives that focus on war and negative peace. Our section thus answers the call to address the dearth of positive peace research through building on the works of Andrea Oelsner and Simon Koschut who advanced the idea that friendship fosters positive peace.

For EISA2025 our section seeks to answer how international friendship(s) specifically can mend (and whether they have mended in the past) this broken world. Concretely, we connect to the three overarching themes of EISA2025, in seeking contributions focused on the politics of (1) witnessing; (2) repairing; and (3) crafting and (re)making this broken world through friendship. We welcome theoretical contributions on what friendship is, practical contributions of international friendship(s) in practice, and methodological contributions on how to study friendship. We especially welcome and feature several panels on studying non-western narratives of friendship through which we hope to create a more complete understanding of the different shapes friendship in international politics takes.

Section Chairs: Taylor Borowetz & Benjamin Herborth

Concepts and theories are the products of their times; they reflect the when, the where, the how, and the what for of their production. The concepts, theories, and categories that IR scholars routinely deploy are predominantly the product of a post-Cold War experience. Often, they either embrace key normative and empirical commitments of the liberal international order, or they develop a critical stance which militates against it. In the face of fundamental social, political, environmental, and economic challenges this constellation looks increasingly fragile and unproductive. Hence, there is a continuing need for theorising and conceptual labour. Against this background, the section will serve as an open and pluralist space to facilitate this type of work across a wide range of perspectives and with a view to democratizing the practice of theory in the field of International Relations.

Section Chairs: Andrea Calderaro & Fabio Cristiano

The rapid evolution of emerging technologies presents complex and multidimensional challenges for global politics. From the global governance issues surrounding critical infrastructure and space to the growing security concerns posed by artificial intelligence, these advancements are reshaping power dynamics, testing the adaptability of existing global governance frameworks and the roles of international organizations, and exacerbating global inequalities. The intersection of technology and international relations raises pressing questions, encompassing not only security concerns but also broader issues of governance, cooperation, and ethical accountability.

This section addresses these challenges by fostering dialogues among scholars examining the impact of emerging technologies on global politics from diverse yet complementary perspectives. By creating an inclusive platform for engagement, the section will explore how international relations theories and practices can respond to the multifaceted challenges these technologies pose, also in relation to the (re-)structuring and remodelling of the international order.

Section Chairs: Benoit Pelopidas & Emma Mc Cluskey

In times where politics is not chaotic, but reactionary and with the disinhibited return of national- chauvinism, economic protectionism and essentialization of identities, the notion of a shared humanity or equality of rights, is under attack. This comes from the radical right and their apartheid logics, the devalorisation of migrants’ status and their treatment along colonial lines. Essentialist identifications however are also apparent outside the discourses of the right,  giving the upper hand to one race, one gender, one origin,  or one so-called historical culture fetishized as homogeneous in order to create differentialism against other cultural “blocks”. These positions, as diverse as they are, play with “negativity” against relations, circulations, heterotopies, pluralities, folds and inter-subjectivities. To think in terms of folds, of moebius strip, of liquidity, of luck and multiple possible futures is by far more successful in debunking the transversal lines of negative continuities and more importantly, capable of showing that history and sociology of human practices are based not on these fetishes and taboos, but on relationality, mobility, humanity, ecology, open futures.

Section Chairs: Dorothe Bohle & Aida A. Hozic

What would European economic policy look like if Europe were to acknowledge that it has long concealed its increasingly peripheral status in the world? And what would this conceptual and political re-orientation mean for Europe’s former growth-engines, such as Germany, and for its Southern or Eastern peripheries? This PEC section aims to bridge two parallel but separate conversations in IPE/CPE literature. First, we aim to build on renewed interest in dependency theory, materially and methodologically de-centering Europe, and exposing it to the gaze of its allegedly subordinated others. Second, we highlight Europe’s dependency, which often hides in plain sight in current political calls for “strategic autonomy,” policy reports (such as Draghi’s), and even in the scholarship on Europe’s declining competitiveness or stagnant growth. Bringing these perspectives into productive dialogue with each other not only bursts the bubble of Europe’s self-imagined importance in global politics but also suggests changes to its political priorities: from the presumed caretaker of its neighborhood to a patient in need of care. As defense emerges as the main consensus-building area within the EU, and security posturing disguises vulnerabilities, Europe risks trading peace for war, and democratic institutions for an ever-more exclusive membership club. Recognizing its dependence and marginality could, instead, forge alternative paths of engagement with the world. The section’s proposed panels will uncover Europe’s dependency in four areas – finance, technology, labor and resources – seeking redress not through violent extractivism but repair.

Section Chairs: Stuart Shields & Daniela Tepe-Belfrage

The key aim of this section is to explore insights gained from the past decade of (particularly feminist) research on social reproduction and the responses from IR/IPE. While there has been a long history of feminist attempts to integrate multiscalar responses to social reproduction there is still much work to be done to extend that engagement to critical IR/IPE.

In contrast to most previous attempts this section seeks to bring empirical work in conversation with theoretical insights. The aim will be to study how IR/IPE might be able to explore how the household, community and state scale are intimately related to the global scale and fundamentally necessary to any meaningful understanding of IR/IPE.

The section seeks papers that speak to issues of inter alia primitive accumulation, state dispossession of communities means of subsistence, institutionalised and structural violence, and processes of (re)production of households, communities and state.

Section Chairs: Roberta N. Haar & Paul Timmers

Strategic technologies have become a defining factor in shaping geopolitical rivalries and cooperation in a rapidly evolving global landscape. This section delves into the interplay between technological rivalry, regulatory frameworks, and multilateralism. The panels in this section explore the dynamics between major powers—China, the US, and the EU—as they vie for dominance in key technological domains such as AI, quantum computing, and digital infrastructure, while also addressing the perspectives of other states and regions like India, ASEAN, and Africa. By examining issues like de-risking, digital governance, ethical AI, and tech competition, the section sheds light on the challenges and opportunities of regulating disruptive technologies. It aims to understand whether key actors will compete or cooperate in shaping the global technological order and considers the implications for security, economic resilience, and human rights. Through this multifaceted exploration, the section highlights the need for balanced approaches that foster innovation while addressing ethical and security concerns, offering insights into how strategic technologies are redefining global politics.

Section Chairs: Quentin Couvreur & Charlotte Desmasures

The “crisis” of multilateralism and global governance has become particularly acute in recent years, fueled by various factors such as the intensifying US-China strategic competition, interstate wars and major conflicts, climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, or rising global inequalities. Yet, this diagnosis is far from new. In fact, recent studies have recast crises as a permanent feature of multilateralism and demonstrated that international institutions are more resilient than usually thought. The role played by the WHO during the Covid-19 pandemic, the enduring centrality of COPs for international negotiations on biodiversity and climate issues, and the expansion of a “brain dead” NATO as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, are testimonies of this resilience in times of crisis.

Therefore, while acknowledging that something is undoubtedly amiss, this section aims to analyze the various attempts at fixing global governance in the face of these challenges by asking two interrelated sets of questions. First, who are the agents and entrepreneurs of this politics of repair? How do states, international bureaucracies, civil societies or private companies contribute to mend multilateral institutions? Second, what are the different modalities and practices of the politics of repair? When do actors simply seek to scoop water out of the sinking multilateral boat? And when do they undertake a more significant restructuring of the ship’s hull? Panels and papers exploring these questions in relation to traditional and non-traditional threats, the changing world order, the influence of inter-socialities, as well as the role of the arts are welcome.

We invite paper proposals speaking to the above and below preliminary panel themes:

• • Re-ordering multilateralism in wake of planetary challenges;
  • Reforming global governance in an era of growing multipolarity;
  • Re-structuring international institutions: the role of civil society and inter-socialities;
  • Repairing the world through multilateralism;
  • Re-inventing multilateralism through the arts.

Section Chairs: Nina Sahraoui & Luis Rivera-Vélez

Over recent decades, scholars in IR have extensively examined what international organizations do—or fail to do—within the scope of so-called global policies. Yet, the literature on international public policymaking remains fragmented, often centered on global governance studies but disconnected from the theoretical frameworks of policy studies. This disconnect limits our understanding of how global policies are shaped, contested, and implemented. As the world faces complex challenges requiring coordinated responses—from climate crises to migration and health emergencies—it is vital to bridge these fields of inquiry to better address global policy dilemmas.

This section seeks to advance IR scholarship by exploring international public policies through a sociological lens. Patrick Hassenteufel’s political sociology approach of policy processes offers a valuable framework for rethinking global governance, aligning with PEC 20205’s theme of imagining politics in a fractured world. By investigating the micro-dynamics of change, policy studies can help overcome entrenched path dependencies and offer innovative solutions to the “patchwork” of global policymaking.

Case studies of organizations such as WHO, IOM, and UNFCCC are particularly relevant for unraveling the complexities of global policy formulation and implementation. These organizations illustrate the contested nature of problem framing, the influence of transnational expertise, and the dynamics of agenda-setting in supranational spaces. This section invites contributions that employ empirical, multi-method approaches, including ethnography, comparative case studies, and network analysis, to bridge policy studies and IR. Submissions that address practical implications for governance reform or theoretical issues of policymaking are especially welcome.

Section Chairs: Irene Piedrahita & Marije Luitjens

This section aims to examine transitional justice experiences, including lessons learned, dilemmas, and challenges for future endeavors. Since the 1990s, transitional justice has emerged as a specialized field dedicated to resolving conflicts and facilitating societal transitions following violence. Its implementation is context-dependent, intricately linked to each country’s unique circumstances and conflict types. Transitional justice also prompts diverse reflections on peace, truth, memory, reparation, and reconciliation, offering possibilities to rethink politics within a broken world. This section is divided into three themes: 1) Renewed focus on gender and decolonial approaches to explore existing transitional justice practices. In line with an increasing focus on gender dimensions and with the broader discussion about decolonisation of knowledge, it is crucial to analyse existing TJ practices within this light. 2) The (im)possibilities of justice without peace. This theme focuses on tensions between peace processes and transitional justice practices. While there is an increasing focus on the ‘local’ within peace practices, TJ practices often remain externally imposed, increasing the potential for new conflict cycles. 3) Moving beyond traditional research to study local experiences of transitional justice. Conventional research methods are sometimes not enough to grasp the hidden emotions, experiences and practices of transition from violence to peace. This theme focuses on alternative and innovative methodologies and methods to explore local micro-dynamics of transitional justice.

Section Chairs: Cristiano Garcia Mendes & Daniel Pedersoli

Since the late 1990s, poststructuralist – or postfoundational – approaches have employed their conceptual and analytical frameworks to understand international phenomena and what is conceived as international. Drawing on philosophical categories developed by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Derrida, poststructuralism seeks to comprehend the conditions under which narratives about the international are established, how issues are framed, how categories become cemented and are legitimised. Rather than merely attempting to provide unambiguous answers about the international arena, poststructuralism aims to dispute and question its established foundations and understand the possibilities that allow not only to set out and frame this particular field of knowledge, but also to erase and displace contradictions, aporias, and inherent instabilities in political and social discourse. Adopting a stance that is both critical and relativistic, poststructuralism positions itself as a non-normative mode of knowledge production, aiming to explore the possibilities of re-signifying the key concepts used by internationalists whilst highlighting the limitations imposed by the very questions raised by more traditional theories. Allegedly positioned somewhere between constructivist approaches — often self-described as a via media — and newer contemporary agendas such as feminism and decolonialism, poststructuralist approaches seek to test the boundaries and generate intersections between established and evolving perceptions and understandings within IR. In a global wave of phenomena like nationalism, authoritarianism, so-called ‘identity politics’ and new – or displaced – social and political rivalries, poststructuralism continues to offer relevant insights and tools concerning not only the international arena in general, but also its premises, assumptions and conclusions.

Section Chairs: Bastiaan van Apeldoorn & Nana de Graaff

The emergence of China as a potential rival to the United States in the global political economy has intensified geopolitical rivalry over leadership in strategic technologies, production, finance, infrastructure and (global) governance. The European Union and an expansionist BRICS among other region formations are trying to position themselves in the midst of these escalating great power tensions.

This is all set against the backdrop of a protracted war in Ukraine, the reignited conflicts in the Middle East, a looming escalation over Taiwan (as the worlds epicenter of chips production), the rise of right-wing populism and domestic polarization in the West and a global climate crisis. In this volatile environment, the future direction of globalization and world politics remains unclear and heavily debated. Will we see a fragmented world order emerge, or are we moving towards a decoupled two-sphere East-West world with the specter of a new Cold War? What are the pathways, whether toward renewed collaboration or conflict, within a multi-polar world order?

This Section will organize five panels to investigate the geopolitical driving forces behind these deepening rifts, the resurgence of economic statecraft, and geoeconomic competition reshaping the highly integrated yet unevenly structured capitalist world economy. In particular, this section is interested in perspectives and analyses that highlight the role of political and economic elites i.e. those in positions of power and decision making power in global politics, how they navigate these uncertainties and shape the direction of world order and global politics.

We invite paper proposals speaking to the above and below preliminary panel themes:

• • Economic statecraft and industrial policy in trade, technology, production and finance;
  • Derisking, decoupling and recoupling: trajectories of deglobalization and reglobalisation;
  • Foreign policy and elite agency in a fragmenting world order;
  • Geopolitics and geoeconomics of the green transition;
  • Changing elite coalitions and geographies

Section Chairs: Anthony Amicelle & Julien Jeandesboz

This section aims to advance discussions on how various forms of calculation are constitutive of, and are relatedly mobilised to govern the international. This interest is located within broader themes related to the (international) politics of knowledge and investigations into international epistemic practices. Calculation is understood to involve quantitative operations related to numbers, counting, measuring and scoring, as well as qualitative operations involving categorizing, mapping, ranking and sorting, and the relation between qualitative and quantitative enactments. In particular, the section aims to explore the continuities and discontinuities introduced by intensifying digitalization and datafication.

The section is particularly but not exclusively dedicated to three lines of inquiry that can be tackled separately or jointly. First, how is calculative authority established and contested? Second, how are international realities enacted through calculative practices? Third, how do sociotechnical devices contribute to the international politics of calculation? While the conveners’ specific expertise lies in international political sociology, border and international mobility, security and finance, the section is by no means thematically limited to these issue areas.

Contributions looking at the following problem spaces would be particularly welcome:

• • Statistics and the statistical production of the international
  • The politics of international indicators
  • Digitalization/datafication and calculation
  • Calculative infrastructures
  • Sociohistorical perspective on the international politics of calculation

Contributions drawing on other disciplinary contexts beyond international studies, such as anthropology, criminology, economy and finance, history, political geography, science and technology studies, and sociology for instance are equally welcome and appreciated.

Section Chairs: Jorg Kustermans & Paula Lamoso-González

The world appears to have entered a period of political disorder, social convulsions, dissensual pluralism, technological disruption and ecological distress. Confronted with this critical landscape, any hope for peaceful change depends on the prudent use of diplomacy . Diplomacy is a set of practices, institutions, discourses and techniques that historically arose as result of the necessary mediation of the estrangement between political communities in an increasingly complex context. Diplomacy predates the current international order and surely, with the corresponding adaptations, will survive its demise. To the extent that world politics is defined by a condition of pluralism and multiplicity, diplomacy will remain one of its core foundations. Diplomacy is a critical tool for the administering of the evolving functional and normative challenges that the on-going transformations entail. At the same time, diplomacy is a practice in constant evolution. Notwithstanding a great deal of inertia, it faces new challenges (e.g., climate change, cybersecurity, demographic unbalances…), is pursued by new types of actors (e.g., TNCs, NGOs, global media), needs to accommodate a changing political mood (e.g., anti-cosmopolitan), and grapples with technological advances (e.g., digitization). This combination of trans-historicity, change and rediscovered urgency has given rise to the vibrant field of Diplomatic Studies, which is primarily grounded in International Relations (IR) and Political Science scholarship, but which increasingly draws inspiration from other social sciences and the humanities. This section wants to offer a platform to ongoing research in diplomatic studies welcoming theoretical and methodological pluralism and interdisciplinarity.

Section Chairs: Pernille Rieker & Morten Bøås

The European Union had to change overnight from a neighbourhood policy focused on incremental reform to one that is about the survival of some Eastern Neighbourhood countries as independent, self-determined states. Ukraine’s application for European Union membership has been immediately replicated by Georgia and Moldova. Russian and Chinese influence in some accession candidate countries is on the rise. This opens crucial questions about the European Union’s enlargement strategy, requiring not only political answers but also academic reflection and expertise. In this section, panels are expected to analyse the European Union’s current neighbourhood and enlargement strategy and toolbox in the light of the new situation where military aggression or the threat with it and political exploitation of economic dependencies are once more used as foreign policy tools in Europe.

Section Chairs: Karina Jędrzejowska & Anna Magdalena Wrobel

Over the recent decade multiple global crises of various nature such as the Covid-19 pandemic, wars in Ukraine and Palestine, climate change, trade wars and rising protectionism, or failure to meet the global development goals, have affected functioning of global economy. As both the crises and their impacts have shown a high degree of interdependence and convergence, it became quite common among scholars and policymakers to describe this conjuncture of crises as a “polycrisis.” Eric Helleiner in his 2024 paper in “International Studies Quarterly” describes polycrisis as “a cluster of distinct crises that interact in ways that they and/or their effects tend to reinforce each other”. He argues that there is an ongoing policris in global economy that negatively affects the process of economic globalization. This is in line with the findings of the 2023 IMF study “Geoeconomic Fragmentation and the Future of Multilateralism” whose authors argue that overlapping and persistent crises contribute to a partial reversal of globalization processes defined as “geoeconomic fragmentation”. Building upon this framework, the section offers a multidisciplinary approach towards analysing current processes and challenges to global economic governance with special reference to the impact of the current polycrisis on the future global economic order. In particular, the section attempts to address the following issues: 1) the anatomy of polycrisis in global economy, 2) future of multilateral global trade and monetary governance, 3) future scenarios for global economic order, 4) international crisis of confidence, 5) shifting balance of power in global economy.

Section Chairs: Sarah Perret & Martina Tazzioli

In International studies, traces are mobilised as clues for reconstructing evidence of violence and human rights violations (forensic approach), as modes of witnessing, as markers of afterlives of violence but also as ways of indexing collective and individual struggles. What characterises traces in their heterogeneity – as archival records, material engravings, digital traces or memories – is their incompleteness and scattered character, often assembled with others. However, far from being a limitation, the traces’ incompleteness registers that power relations are grounded on and produce partial erasures, obstructed forms of agency, and subaltern memories. More recently, research on borders and migration, and debates in IPS have taken traces seriously for reflecting on how to re-compose collective subjects that are not predicated on homogeneity but that, rather, start on fragmentation. The increasing use of digital technologies also raises more confusion and frictions in the role played by traces within international politics and practices.

The section seeks to explore the possible use of traces as methodological and analytical starting points for rethinking key topics in global politics (borders, violence, sovereignty, memory, struggles). It interrogates what the production of critical knowledge in International studies can gain from traces as methodological and analytical tools, and on the hierarchisation of traces that determines which traces are deemed political or count as relevant clues.

Section Chairs: Giulia Carabelli & Sharri Plonski

To grapple with brokenness is to contend with a cascade of structures, agents, uneven impacts and accumulations of violence – the durability of genocide (in Gaza and beyond), environmental devastation, authoritarian brutalities and impoverished lives – without accepting it as unalterable or unequivocal. It is to do the work of writing, revealing and rebuilding, over and over again (Gilmore, 2020). As such, this section interrogates possibilities of remaking, reimagining and disrupting brokenness through telling its seen and unseen stories. It invites learning from those who have always known, witnessed and challenged brokenness; who reimagine new landscapes, futures, connections and potentialities, attuned to fissures and cracks that help unravel and fracture the present. Its aim is to host a collective search for stories, voices, listeners and alternative timelines that can help us better understand how to stay with the moods, textures, sounds of brokenness without surrendering to it. This section calls for stories and storytelling that can sit with both the violent scars of broken worlds, and the sutures that might be made by reckoning with them. Inspired by the work of Black, Indigenous, queer and feminist radical traditions, we ask how stories might help see the world on different terms, through rhythms and folds in space-time that allow other possibilities to seep through. And yet, we also understand storytellers/stories as entangled in the politics that make broken-ness our reality; in the racialised, gendered and classed structures that shape whose stories are heard; who is visible, legible, seen and unseen.

Section Chairs: Marijn Hoijtink & Italo Brandimarte

The role of digital technologies in global politics is gathering increasing attention. However, as technologies like AI, machine learning, and quantum computing progressively pervade the practices and imaginaries of international politics, scholars of IR are still faced with deep tensions inherent in the global digital revolution. On the one hand, the digital seems to radically transform the ways world politics is done, envisioned and understood. Digital technologies picture an imminent future that is increasingly virtual and that overcomes human agency and control. On the other, the digital appears to be deeply rooted in familiar relations of power and inequality – relations that are embodied and material, rather than abstract and virtual. The miracle of AI, for instance, is often powered by millions of exploited data annotators in the Global South. This section seeks to critically explore the tensions and contradictions surrounding the digital dimension of global politics. We ask: how does ‘the digital’ challenge, rework, or reconfirm existing concepts or registers of power in IR? What are the tools, frameworks and methodologies that best illuminate the relations between digital technologies and international relations?

This section will bring together, synthesise and push forward key debates on digital technologies and global politics across different subdisciplines in IR. We invite contributions that engage with the Digital IR research agenda along the following pathways (and beyond):

1. Digitising the international: How do digital technologies enact the international and how do they remake international relations at the level of politics and policy? How does ‘the digital’ reconfigure established IR concepts like violence, power, ordering?

2. Resisting the digital: To what extent is the digital an object of political critique? How can critical traditions (including feminist, post-/de-colonial, indigenous, disability and queer perspectives) understand the digital as a tool or a target of political resistance?
3. Doing digital IR: How can we do IR through and with digital technologies? How does it affect the collection, production and circulation of knowledge as well as the ways we work together?

Section Chairs: Rens van Munster & Kiran Phull

Images of catastrophe have been at the forefront of political and anti-political discourse, from climate change and predictions about artificial intelligence to conspiracy narratives about the ‘deep state’. It has become increasingly difficult to imagine a future beyond the catastrophic present to which we seemingly only can bear witness. Yet, catastrophic imaginaries co-exist with financialized futures of speculation, tech innovation and other technologies of future-making. At the same time, radical futures – e.g., Black, Indigenous, multispecies, decolonial and queer futures – challenge the idea of catastrophic end times from the margins. As a result, futures emerge at the intersection of various practices. Expert technologies such as foresight, forecasting, risk management, scenario planning, modeling, and horizon scanning now intersect with prophecy, speculation, fantasy, innovation, design, and imagination.

We invite proposals that interrogate future-making as a political practice that must grapple with irreversible loss, persistent uncertainty, and the need for alternatives. How might we conceive of futures when traditional frameworks of crisis, progress, recovery and repair no longer suffice? We seek contributions that examine how different actors, institutions, and communities imagine, design, craft, enact, inhabit and value futures while acknowledging that something in world politics is fundamentally broken.

Section Chairs: Luis Aue & Maria Ketzmerick-Calandrino

While postcolonial approaches have successfully recovered and recrafted alternative imaginaries of global politics, the contributions of socialist worldmaking remain remarkably absent from current debates on alternative political orders. The PoSoc section addresses this gap by witnessing, theorizing, and (re-)crafting the underexplored internationalisms of the socialist world. Socialist projects of worldmaking have responded to a world perceived as broken by capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Revisiting the Global East allows us to recover socialist attempts of crafting a different world, challenging conventional narratives that limit the Global East to bloc confrontation.

The section brings together the emerging literatures on the internationalisms of past state-socialist projects, the post-socialist condition, and current transnational socialist movements. We facilitate conversations around historical trajectories, transitions, connections, and periodization of events commonly framed within Cold War narratives. The section invites historical inquiries into International Relations of the East. It examines how socialist imaginaries, infrastructures, and institutions continue to shape the post-socialist present in both the East and the Global South. Hence, we shed light on alliances and differences between socialist and anticolonial projects of recrafting global politics. Key to this exploration is re-examination foundational IR concepts —such transnational cooperation, personal and collective freedom, and ontologies of the political and the economic– from the vantage point of the Global East. Beyond historical socialism, the section also witnesses contemporary alternative world orders offered by socialist movements, while keeping them connected to the multifaceted and often violent and despotic experiences in the socialist world. Methodologically, PoSoc welcomes diverse forms of inquiry—quantitative, qualitative, historical, and ethnographic and invites methodological reflections on how to approach the Global East.

Section Chairs: Alex Colás & Rowan Lubbock

Whether in relation to global agribusiness’ contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions, its contribution to biodiversity destruction on land and at sea, or with regard to its effects on social injustice and health inequalities, the global food system is in dire need of repair. Food sovereignty and agrecological or regenerative agriculture are among some of the transnational responses to this predicament, as are regional or international initiatives under the guise of global governance (such as the UN’s New Urban Agenda). Yet even these attempts at living and crafting societies with, rather than against, nature pose significant conceptual and political challenges: How can food sovereignty move beyond the state and autarky? Why is the corporate concentration so pronounced in the global food system? And what are the socio-cultural implications of hybrid, transnational food cultures within a broader politics of repair?

This special section proposes to place the everyday ‘social fact’ of eating at the centre of IR by threading the economic, ecological, political and cultural dimensions of food (and drink) into the analysis of contemporary global politics. By looking backward, sideways, downwards, upwards, inwards and outwards across the fragmented world of global food politics, we intend in the course of five diverse panels to showcase existing work-in-progress and encourage new research into the ways in which the global food system is at once a fulcrum of planetary loss and damage, and a critical site for the repair and regeneration of a broken world.

We welcome proposals for papers on the following themes:

• • Critical (Inter)national Histories of Global Food Systems
  • Crisis, Competition and Concentration in the Global Agrifood System
  • Just Transitions in the Global Food System: land workers, peasants and fishers for a decarbonised world
  • Food Sovereignty, Agroecology, Artisan fisheries and Global Food Futures
  • Global Food, Local Culture: the challenges of terroir, authenticity and appropriation in the global food system
  • Urban, Peri-urban and Rural geographies in transnational food supply chains

Section Chairs: Klaus Dingwerth & Philipp Pattberg

The section aims to provide a platform for scholars of global environmental politics to present their ongoing work. We welcome papers from all kinds of theoretical traditions – positivist, interpretive, critical, decolonial, and more – and disciplines in the field of international studies. Contributions should deal with either (a) the processes through which various actors transboundary address environmental challenges (politics), (b) the social and political structures created and maintained by such processes (polity), and/or (c) the substantive rules and regulations actors (seek to) set and implement in this issue area (policy). Contributions to the section may deal with governmental and/or non-governmental efforts to govern environmental issues across borders, and while the climate crisis is likely to figure be a central theme, we explicitly invite papers on a broad range of other transboundary environmental problems. Novel conceptual or theoretical contributions to the field are equally welcome.

Section Chairs: Katharina Glaab & Enrike van Wingerden & Nina Klimburg-Witjes

As space activities open new “frontiers” for exploration and exploitation, scholars across disciplines are highlighting the growing interconnections between Earth and outer space. An expanding array of Earth observation and surveillance satellites, the rise of commercial actors, and the construction of new spaceports and space technologies are transforming our relationship with space. These developments are part of a new space economy that impacts security and environmental politics, raising critical questions about sustainability, equity, and the future of international relations. How do aspirations for space exploration and exploitation echo colonial histories on Earth, and what implications does this have for global justice? How are space technologies and infrastructures conceived and built, and what kind of futures do they make possible – or foreclose? What does it mean to think of politics beyond Earth, and how might this transform our conceptual thinking in International Relations and beyond? This section aims to create a platform for exploring the new ways in which Earth and outer space are becoming connected. We seek to offer a place for intellectual exchange among the increasing number of scholars engaging with outer space politics and governance. The section encourages research perspectives from critical security studies, science and technology studies (STS), environmental politics, decolonial and postcolonial studies, and cultural anthropology that advance a symmetrical perspective on space activities and infrastructures’ material and imaginative aspects.

Section Chairs: Valerie Waldow & David Chandler

This proposed section seeks to explore the potential of ‘working with the negative’ in the context of IR. We address the Conference theme Politics for a Broken World and the desire for new modes of perception, repair and construction by inviting participants to delve deeper into the problematic of how we engage critically with what exists while avoiding either the disavowal of modernity’s violences and exclusions or risking their reproduction.

The section will open up ‘the negative’ as a space for rethinking fundamental concepts such as worlds, subjectivity, agency, temporality, resistance and refusal. The concept of negativity has its roots in Hegelian, Post-Hegelian and Marxist scholarship, as well as in Frankfurt School Critical Theory and in contemporary Critical Black Studies. In this context, negativity emerges as a critical perspective that challenges and disrupts the boundaries and divisions of modernity, rather than moving to produce or claim new ontological certainties and alternative modes of governance. Many contemporary approaches within IR, particularly those rooted in relational paradigms and concerned with the Anthropocene, work with the negative in ways that are generative of non-modernist approaches to the world and our current predicament. We seek to critically explore different ways of working with the negative at the end of/ after/ and in opposition to modernist framings and to interrogate the stakes in assuming that modernity is ending/ has ended/ still requires ending.

Section Chairs: Amna Kaleem

This section will comprise five panels and focus on the violence made permissible in the name of countering terrorism and extremism. This allows us to branch out into different themes tackling the violence of the security state at both domestic and international levels. Through the theme of coloniality of terrorism, we will look at the ongoing and current settler colonial violence in Gaza, which has been described as a plausible genocide by the ICJ. Our panels will unpack the multifaceted nature of this violence through papers on the dehumanisation of Palestinian liberation struggles, the repression of Palestine solidarity, media complicity and censorship, and liberatory pedagogical practices. This will be complemented with a wider focus on the discursive power of the category ‘terrorism’ and the manifestation of its violence in domestic counter-terrorism and counterextremism policies that create suspect communities and limit the scope of civic activism.

Section Chairs: Stefan A. Schirm & R. Melis Baydag

The last decade has witnessed political, economic, and military disruptions that challenged longstanding conceptions of world order and contributed to the perception of a „broken world“. Global power shifts, de-globalization trends, Russia’s wars and employment of military force towards neighbouring countries, China’s ascent as a prime rival to the United States, the Brexit, and Trumpian disruption have all contributed to the breaking of the world order as we knew it. The disruption of former structures and rules of international relations, however, is often accompanied by the development of new processes and institutions. Around the world, governments and private actors are increasingly resorting to geopolitical and geoeconomic strategies that privilege national and regional interests to the detriment of global-multilateral policies. This geoeconomic and geopolitical turn can be observed, for instance, regarding the new protectionism and industrial policies in the USA and Europe, the building of an alternative world order led by China and centred on the BRICS countries and the Global South, the increased role of middle-sized emerging countries in their respective regions as well as the contested role of the G20 as a new steering committee for world politics. The proposed section includes 5 panels that delve into the aforementioned dimensions of international relations, aiming to assess the new geopolitics and geoeconomics of a fragmented world order from diverse theoretical and empirical perspectives.

Section Chairs: Aina García Mestre & Jordi Serra del Pino

The perception that the world is broken is understandable, particularly from an international relations perspective. Yet, if once framed the world as ruptured, then the only sensible way to address it is trying to mend it with updated politics that provide solutions instead of worsening the situation. If we accept that we are experiencing postnormal times—a transitional epoch characterized by increasing levels of complexity, chaos and contradictions—the standpoint shifts. From a postnormal perspective it is not the world that is falling apart, but a particular conception of it, and continuing to use outdated resources is a solution that will not last, nor repair anything. We are witnessing the last throes of modernity. Technically, culturally, economically—and specially—communicatively, our societies have moved on.The advent of the digital revolution has deeply transformed almost every aspect of our daily lives. Yet, at the international level, we seem to be stuck with an IR perspective dating back to the principles of the Peace of Westphalia. Postnormal times show us the reason this concept of the world is dying is not because it is broken, but rather because it no longer fits to address the current existential threats humanity is facing. Nonetheless, once accepted that we are undergoing a major transition, there is little to solve, but much to imagine, conceive and plan for. Postnormal times politics must help to set courses to best navigate the present time and plan for a better future, being an invitation for those politics attuned to deal with complexity, chaotic behaviours and contradictions. Politics that explore new kinds of governance, especially at the international level. Postnormal Times Theory fits perfectly in this case to establish itself as a key theory to understand International Relations, and to guide those paths that—while seeming broken—may only be stuck in old ways.

Section Chairs: Sergio Aguilar

Regardless of the meaning of the term crisis and the area in which it is applied, world politics constantly faces crises. In today’s unpredictable world, crises is hence at the heart of the various challenges currently facing our societies. However, while some crises get the attention of policymakers, others remain marginal on the international agenda. Moreover, most crises that have arisen in this century demonstrate the failure of the international community to deal with them. In this sense, this section will bring together papers that address crises from different theoretical and empirical perspectives. These include (but are not limited to): humanitarian crises provoked by internal and international conflicts and migration; the role of states, international organisations and other relevant actors in crises management/resolution; and challenges, successes and failures of crises’ interventions. We invite papers that address understandings of crises centring on actors, objects, targets, modes and practices across the spectrum of contemporary International Security (and beyond), particularly those that bring innovative analysis that contribute to further expanding the understanding and perspectives of the subject.

Section Chairs: Esther Marijnen & Benjamin Neimark

How does war and military build-up wound socio-environmental relations and landscapes? What vernacular memories and grounded histories are produced with armed violence? What are the implications of a ‘military green transition’ for eco-socially just global futures? This stream recognises and expands upon growing scholarly interest coalescing these questions, exploring the multiple entanglements between militarisation, practices/ rationalities of warfare and the environment. Special attention is dedicated to the multi-scalar politics of socio-environmental destruction, from local ecologies to global climate breakdown. These themes weave together stories of, and attention to, all three of EISA PEC 2025’s core focuses: the politics of witnessing (war’s socio-environmental wounds), repair (recognising, resisting and repairing eco-social trauma) and crafting (un/ and re/ making harmful policies and their institutionalisation).

The stream explores how International Relations, and critical security/military studies in particular, can build on emerging studies in (geo)political ecology, environmental anthropology, history and critical geography addressing war and the Earth. The stream departs from a refutation of the tendency among scholars and practitioners to promote apolitical, atheoretical and non-empirically driven distinctions between war’s human and environmental costs, such as ‘climate security’ and ‘threat multiplier’ narratives so favoured by contemporary policymakers and military actors. Further, the stream aims to expand critical scholarly knowledge of the emergence of “net zero militaries”, “green war” and “sustainable arms”, inquiring into the socio-environmental wounds of military “greening”.

We identify a set of closely linked sub-themes/ debates of significant theoretical, conceptual, empirical and practitioner relevance that we want to bring into conversation and explore further:

1. 1. Logics and practices of warfare in environmental protection (militarised conservation, securitisation of climate change)
   2. The socio-environmental costs of war and military build-up
   3. The carbon footprint of militaries, weapons technologies and war (the weaponisation of nature)
   4. The greening of the military, the militarisation of the green transition and the expansion of new extractive frontiers

Section Chairs: Rafael Biermann & Nicolo Fasola

This section aims to explore Patron-Client Relations (PCRs) in contemporary world politics. Originally used in IR to capture the superpowers’ relations with their clients during the Cold War, today the concept has regained relevance for explaining an international context, where a variety of actors vie to establish asymmetric and yet mutually valued resource-exchange partnerships to project power, protect their interests, and diffuse norms. Patrons and clients can be very diverse, ranging from great, medium, and small powers to international organisations, corporations, and transnational advocacy networks. IR scholarship is still grappling with how PCRs structure today’s world across policy domains, well beyond traditional security. The section seeks to achieve two objectives. First, it aims to theorise PCRs, their basic characteristics and dynamics and distinguish them from related concepts (e.g., alliances, hierarchy, clientelism) to establish a coherent and widely applicable analytical framework. Second, the section intends to unpack the empirical diversity of PCRs, identifying different types of patrons and clients (e.g., state and non-state, patron- and client-sets), investigating the dynamics that govern these relationships, and assessing the utility of the PCR framework in multiple policy areas. The proposed theme aligns with the broader goal of the conference, in particular its suggestions on a politics of ‘repair’ and ‘crafting and making.’ By taking stock of scholarship on PCR and related concepts/phenomena, this section seeks to stimulate conceptual innovation and enrich our understanding of today’s world dynamics. We invite scholars to explore new theoretical understandings, empirical domains and methodological avenues to unpack how PCRs structure and stimulate the dynamics of politics in a broken world – at macro-, meso-, and micro-levels.

Section Chairs: Judith Renner

Whereas animals have been neglected by IR research for most of its existence, ‘the animal question’ has recently gained leverage within the discipline for normative and analytical reasons. This section invites papers which analyze, conceptualize, critically review and recraft international human animal relations. Papers may (1) bear witness of the roles animals play within empirical international politics past and present, as well as the impacts international politics has (had) on animals, including the many violences they are subjected to. Paper givers may fall back on established IR concepts such as power, violence, war/peace, sovereignty, cooperation etc. or creatively import new illuminating concepts and theories from other disciplines. Contributions may also (2) aim to repair international human-animal relations by developing critical and normative accounts of international human-animal relations, e.g. from perspectives such as Post-humanism, Marxism, Feminism, Post-colonial Theory or Critical Theory, or by focusing on particular concepts such as justice, emancipation or empowerment, identifying central emancipatory potentials and developing theoretical perspectives from which e.g. animal agency, resistance or human-animal cooperation can be understood. Finally, (3) papers may aim to recraft international human-animal relations by developing political or legal visions, institutions and programmes through which these relations could be improved and institutionalized in a future world politics.

Section Chairs: Michael Livesey & Frank Maracchione

How to move beyond crisis, rupture, and temporal exception in international studies? This section brings together scholars across a range of disciplines and geographies to explore what we can learn from attention to historical continuities, structures, and the longue durée. Can sensitivity to the underlying, the deep-rooted, and the slow help our disciplines overcome their present preoccupation with the momentary, the present, and the fast? The section welcomes contributions addressing themes such as:

1. 1. The role of historical structures in shaping contemporary international politics – including structures of coloniality, capitalism, gender, and race.
   2. The different concepts of time animating international politics and its analysis – from the immediacy of present crisis/rupture to the continuities of the longue durée.
   3. Whether international studies scholarship suffers a bias towards crises and ruptures, and what modes of politics such biases might invisibilise (for instance, marginalising ‘slow’ violences).

Across these discussions, the section aims to advance international studies (including international relations, international political economy, and related disciplines) beyond the ‘omnipresence’ of crisis, and towards a new approach re-centring the long-term conditions and contradictions in which such immediate crises are grounded.

Section Chairs: Anna Grzywacz & Guangyu Qiao-Franco

Asia, now increasingly called the Indo-Pacific, has emerged as a central hub of global economic growth, political dynamism, and cultural diversity. The region’s geostrategic importance has grown exponentially in recent years, exemplified by the US’s policy of ‘pivot to Asia’ since 2011 and the European leadership’s announcement to play a ‘more active role’ in and around Asia in 2022. The increasing interconnectivity between regions implies that the major geopolitical shifts, economic realignments, and security challenges currently unfolding in Asia and the Indo-Pacific will have significant implications beyond the region.

Drawing from the “Politics for a Broken World” theme, this section explores the region’s dynamics in light of shifting geopolitical realities, environmental crises, and socio-economic challenges to unpack the relationship between fragmentation and cooperation.

Section Chairs: Erica Almeida Resende & Catarina Kinnvall

In the last 20 years, there has been a boom in the research on emotions and affect in IR. From being neglected and invisible in mainstream IR, it has become a growing subject of research about foreign policy, conflict, diplomacy, and institutions. Initially, scholars explored the role of emotions in political decision-making, especially in contexts framed as crisis, as well as its centrality in diplomacy. The literature also investigated how political leaders, and the general public emotionally react to political events, prompting constructivists to incorporate emotions into their analyses. More recently, studies have investigated how emotions structure and shape global identities and communities, conflicts, and everyday practices. This scholarship focuses on the norms governing emotional expressions in rituals, symbolic performances, and social practices, as well as its interplay with ontological (in)security. It also examines how emotion and affect mobilize security narratives, memories, myths and securitization practices to legitimize security policies, as well as its interaction with visual images and representations. Today, as the field acknowledges its ‘Emotional Turn’, many gaps remain. This Standing Group wishes to push forward this scholarship, by encouraging the following questions: How does one define emotion and affect? Are they universal? How to best observe and study them? Are new methods needed? How do people and collectives affectively invest in – and contest – emotional discourses? How do emotions contribute (or not) to social change? What is the role of history and historical change in emotion research? How are emotions governed and how can they be historicized?

Section Chairs: Deepshikha Shahi & Nora Fisher Onar

The rationale for the section evolves from the call to broaden, diversify, and globalise the study of IR. The academic initiatives to globalise IR have been taken up by scholars from both the Global North and South. Although there are many labels used to describe the fragmented attempts to enrich Global IR, many recent studies go beyond the critique of the predominant Western-centrism while excavating insights from the hitherto underexplored indigenous knowledge traditions to enhance the understandings of contemporary global politics. This standing section on Globalising IR will offer an intellectual space to all scholars working on any aspects of IR who want to make the academic discipline more “Global” by making efforts to de-center IR knowledge and reconcile the West/non-West binaries. EISA offers a perfect multi-disciplinary platform to advance the “de-centering agenda” of Global IR across multiple strands of scholarship – established and burgeoning alike. To this effect, this section seeks to encourage all kinds of theoretical, applied, and pedagogical explorations which reveal the territorial fluidity of IR knowledge, and which challenge, while also attempting to transcend, the provincialized notions of the West and the non-West. As such, this section aims to sponsor a multicultural intellectual conversation which is concerned with not only where we (as learners of IR) hail, or whether we can learn relationally irrespective of our American, European, Asian, African, or Australian origins, but also with forging a fresh IR consciousness as inhabitants of a “Global world” constituted by long overlooked forms of connectivity for a field of study and practice that is far richer than traditional IR has imagined.

Section Chairs: Hannes Hansen-Magnusson & Romain Chuffart

The politics of the polar regions and global oceans showcase evolving relationships between societies, questions over resource extraction, ownership, and the changing impact of technologies. Polar and ocean spaces are sometimes subject to spatial disputes, complicating responses to contemporary challenges like biodiversity protection, Indigenous rights, and transboundary issues such as plastic pollution. Balancing states’ needs and security concerns with ecological and social crises requires reimagining governance frameworks. International collaborations, such as the Arctic Council and the Antarctic Treaty System but also the major ocean treaties (UNCLOS, BBNJ), aim to coordinate responses to these pressures, involving state and non-state actors. Yet, challenges persist. These challenges not only involve questions over access, ownership and belonging, but also the securities of maritime (and deep-sea) infrastructures and resources, as well as human interaction with oceans and coastal areas more broadly. This section seeks to expand on global ocean and polar politics by exploring social and political responses to the unfolding ecological and geopolitical crises, providing the opportunity for raising questions of justice, such as colonial or intergenerational, and theoretically advanced understandings of global politics.

Section Chairs: Nicholas Thomas & Catherine Lo

Health sits at the center of politics and international relations. Humanity’s impact on nature has seen nature impact on humanity. Novel diseases cross borders and populations with ease threatening relations between countries. The impact of there diseases represents an existential challenge to state and economic viability as well as social stability. As the impact of the Anthropocene becomes more evident, it is necessary to understand how the politics of this relationship functions if we are to manage the health challenges that will only become more prevalent in the future. EISA Global Health draws together participants across the natural and social sciences. These different disciplines bring their own methodological concerns and priorities, ranging from equality of access to mechanisms of governance to the epistemologies of health and disease underlying the politics and international relations of global health. Our global health panels encourage the cross-disciplinary fertilization of theories and approaches that helps to identify opportunities for the mitigation of the health crises facing all life. We encourage and welcome all participants with an interest in this topic to present their research and join in our discussions.

Section Chairs: Zeynep Gülşah Çapan & Jaakko Heiskanen

Historical International Relations has grown into a flourishing subfield of International Relations (IR) with strong interdisciplinary ties to neighboring fields including Global History, Imperial History, Global Historical Sociology, and the History of International Political Thought. The HIST section provides an inclusive platform for reflections on the value of historical knowledge in explaining and understanding international affairs. It seeks to foster a greater historical sensitivity in the study of international politics and to facilitate productive conversations around historical trajectories, transitions, connections, and periodisations. The section aims to engage a wide range of scholarship, spanning from more theoretical reflections on history and IR to more specific empirical discussions. It approaches Historical IR from a global perspective and welcomes studies on any region of the world and from any time period. The section is methodologically pluralist and welcomes all kinds of approaches to the study of history and IR, both quantitative and qualitative. The HIST section thus invites scholars interested in all types of historical inquiry: from micro-histories of the international to macro-historical accounts of world orders, and from historical studies of a specific event or phenomenon to historiographical explorations of the academic field of IR.

Section Chairs: Valeria Bello & Sarah Leonard

International Migration, Nationalism and Interethnic Relations are increasingly debated in both the discipline and the practice of International Relations. Physical and non-physical borders, broadly intended, constitute crucial political spaces where ideas of survival and supremacy, innovation and tradition, vulnerabilities and powers, futures and pasts, are fought. The ways to limit human mobility and diversity become both externalized and internalized in the governance of control. Patrolling those who are in and out the national and its inclusion is widely based on dynamics of exclusions and inequalities. Prejudice is converted into an extensively used and justified mechanism, performing in the self-fulfilling of threats, and spiralling processes of insecurities and exceptionalities. A logic of dominance and supremacism propagate across space. Thence, discriminations also engender in spiralling ways. Irrational rationalities often manifest, and therefore we also encourage to examine such questions through means that do not seek to resolve puzzles but present analysis of paradoxes. Without excluding a diversity of approaches, theories and perspectives, this Standing Section invites scholars to reflect upon a variety of topics, such as: the ways prejudice and inequalities perform in a spiralling process of insecurity; the intersection of body, race, gender and origin, situated in the relational space of the encounter; cognitions, mentalities and ideas permeating politics of control and patrol, either through externalization or internalization; how dynamics of dominance and supremacy propagate across spaces, including in post-colonial dimensions; analysis of paradoxes in nationalism, migration or interethnic relations. We welcome both theory-building and empirical analysis related to these issues.

Section Chairs: Ingvild Bode & Max Lesch

Over the past 15 years, international practice theories have developed into an innovative research programme in International Relations. Outlining and developing novel concepts and frameworks combined with a renewed interest in methodology, scholars focusing on international practices have included new kinds of empirical material on world political phenomena including but not limited to the debates about the normativity of international practices, the role of technology, and processes of knowledge production. This section invites scholars interested in international practices to take stock of how this theoretical programme develops, to review ongoing research projects, and to reflect on conceptual vocabularies, but also to discuss the current boundaries of international practice research and their potential expansion. The section focuses on three core themes: (1) to facilitate debates about broadening theoretical horizons by embracing and promoting a wide range of theoretical perspectives and fostering diversity in the understanding of international practices; (2) to work towards further empirical enrichment of the study of international practices in IR; and (3) to explore methodological innovations to ensure a more nuanced and in-depth study of international practices. Pursuing these core themes will likely continue the increasing and welcome diversification of international practice theories beyond the established “canon” by exploring the links to related frameworks and disciplines such as pragmatism, anthropology, science and technology studies, or narrative and visual approaches. As a section, we particularly welcome contributions that drive forward theoretical, conceptual, and methodological debates, and present empirical findings of practice-based research in IR.

Section Chairs: Tom Scheunemann & Fiona Schrading

The Anthropocene has become a much debated concept for IR scholars and across the humanities to conceptualize the planetary challenges of ecological turmoil. Well beyond the physical impacts of climate change and their rise as issues for policy making, the Anthropocene is increasingly addressed as a challenge to our basic assumptions about how we know and what we understand the world to be – fundamentally destabilizing much of IRs traditional disciplinary concerns and assumptions.

If the Anthropocene marks a condition after the “global” and “international”, it is not characterized by a new sense of order or stability. Rather, it points towards a broken world in which the crisis of conceptual apparatuses of IR and their institutional forms overlap with and are altered by new conflicts, technological conditions, ecological devastation and post-apocalyptic sentiments.

The Anthropocene thus marks an ongoing time of brokenness and endings that ‚we‘ cannot overcome and leave behind. It challenges us to re-think what it means to live and think with/in an irreversibly damaged planet and a political world in turmoil.

This section aims to provide a space for the multiple engagements of IR scholars with the Anthropocene, to think through the new forms of political agency, struggle and governance that we see emerging, but also foster discussions with other disciplinary perspectives. In particular, we want to encourage critical discussions of the concept – for example from decolonial, (queer-)feminist, new materialist and poststructuralist perspectives – and invite debates about new imaginations to undo and rethink (anthropocentric) conceptions of modern politics and norms, government, political agency, justice etc.

In each of the three years, we want to set different focuses in relation to the respective conference topic. This year, we want to put a special focus on the topic of “Temporalities in the Anthropocene”.

We want to invite scholars to explore the multiple dimensions of temporality that characterize international relations in the Anthropocene: How do temporalities of governance, crisis and resistance come to matter in the Anthropocene? Where do modern (political) temporalities break down, pile up, haunt us or transform in the Anthropocene? How do we re-think temporalities of repair, care, hope, refusal and resurgence in broken world(s)? This includes both conceptual work on temporalities as well as empirical investigations of the complex manifestations of temporalities in relation to global anthropogenic changes.

Section Chairs: Jef Huysmans & Renata Summa

This section aims at offering a space in EISA conferences for the engagement with agendas of research that gravitate around international political sociology as a site of critical explorations of the ‘problem of the international’.  In the past fifteen years IPS sought to expand critical investigations at the intersection of different disciplinary fields in the social sciences in a move to expand and diversify scholarship in IR.  The efforts to continuously push the limits of this intellectual movement, IPS has produced a variety of initiatives that have, for the most part, contributed to consolidate its transdisciplinary and transversal agenda, connecting scholars and researchers who share a disposition to transgress institutionalized repertoires of analysis and displace questions, methods and styles considered acceptable in the field.  Following the exploration of the in-between, the contingent and the multiple in world politics that defines IPS, the section will stimulate debates that further its innovative research programme focusing on the importance of boundary traversing phenomena in world politics and on dynamics of fracturing social and political orders. Despite an intensified interest in the situated, the everyday, the event, and the local in IPS, gaining IR credentials still often requires that these little or momentary analyses have something to say about big orders, transformations and world histories. IPS is a site of exploring concepts and approaches that problematises these pulls towards the ‘big’. It does so by inviting conceptual and methodological inventing that challenges sociologies of order and explores sociologies of transversal connecting.

Section Chairs: Charlotta Friedner Parrat & Nicolás Terradas

This section brings together researchers who are interested in the analysis of the international realm as a society, its institutions and norms, as well as their development. It wants to encourage debates about the historical development and present nature of the international society and international order, how its norms and institutions emerged and developed, its relations with world society, and its challenges. We value both analytical and normative approaches. Thus, we are, for instance, interested in analyses of how different types of institutions relate to each other and how they affect the behaviour of states and other actors, as much as we want to encourage normative and critical engagement with the current world order and its ongoing transformations. This includes, for instance, analyses of the tensions between pluralism and solidarism or between the global and regional international societies, or studies of the shifting distribution of power and its effects on international society and its institutions. While some of these issues are at the heart of the so-called “English School” of International Relations, we find them in many other theories and approaches, including Social Constructivism, Systems Theory, Institutionalism and various Critical Theories. We thus see the study of international society as a bridge between many IR approaches, and encourage a pluralism of methodologies. For 2025, we are particularly interested in paper and panel proposals that analyse the transformations of international society in the face of global threats and challenges.

Section Chairs: Corine Wood-Donnelly & Johanna Ohlsson

The purpose of the section is to elevate the conversation between theories of justice and International Relations. While issues of justice are of growing significance in the international discourse in relation to post-colonial experiences, climate governance and globalisation, for example, this has yet to significantly infiltrate the norms of the international system, analysis of international politics or influence the explanatory frameworks of the major International Relations paradigms. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the recent COP negotiations that show states still unwilling to accept responsibility for climate reparations and adaptation– or in another example, the information war eroding the foundations of democracy and geopolitical stability. Yet, the absence of justice threatens the foundations of the international order through the neglect of the social contract, the undermining of sovereign legitimacy and the spillover effects of legacies of injustice that cannot be contained by national borders. With justice critically needed as an envisioned part of the new normal, this section proposes to bring a number of themes into focus through the lens of justice. This includes: international environmental governance, the Arctic as critical site of climate justice, the relationship between the global and local in questions of sustainability and community resilience, historical perspectives of injustice and, finally, to ask: What can justice theory bring to International Relations?

Section Chairs: Mariam Salehi & Werner Distler

While the study of knowledge and its role in international politics has long been at the centre of IR research, we can observe a rise of interest in the topic over the last decade. The section “Knowledge in International Relations. Epistemic Struggles in a Complex World” reflects on the state-of-the-art of knowledge-focused studies for the discipline, and at a critical engagement with the possibilities and limitations of knowledge-focused frameworks for a future world. It therefore invites both theoretical and empirical contributions, those that deal with epistemic struggles as a subject of inquiry for the discipline, as well as the knowledge politics that shape the discipline itself. We invite papers, panels, and roundtables that cover a range of knowledge dimensions, e.g. 1) the role of experts and their expertise in decision-making of states, IOs, or in non-state contexts, 2) epistemic communities and the manifestations of knowledge in discourse, 3) concrete epistemic practices observable in international and transnational politics, 4) the role of knowledge in the constitution of objects of global governance, with a more material and technological focus, or 5) the knowledge politics of the discipline itself. We envision contributionsto be drawn from the following fields and topics, among others: 1) war, peace and conflict, 2) security studies, 3) political economy 3) post/decoloniality, 4) gender, and 5) norms, rules, and institutions. One key focus should thereby be on struggles over knowledge orders, the emergence of epistemic authority, and, ultimately, the relationship of knowledge and power in a future world.

Section Chairs: Hager Ben Jaffel & Sebastian Larsson

World events today demonstrate how intelligence gathering plays an increasingly crucial role in the definition of and solution to international problems, diffusing intelligence practices to countless professional fields, such as policing and border controls, counterterrorism, everyday surveillance, global trade, and diplomacy. In such contexts, intelligence seeks to anticipate the future by introducing into the present a logic of classification, differentiation, and division between those deemed suspicious or threatening on the one hand, and those to be secured on the other. Traditional intelligence services remain important too, but their priorities have expanded from protecting state secrets to conducting digital surveillance on citizens across the globe using advanced technologies. Intelligence has as such become a core component in the unfolding of multiple crises and disasters globally. An increasing number of people are entangled with intelligence work, either as agents or targets.

The established field of Intelligence Studies (IS) has largely failed to keep track of these current transformations of/in intelligence work, however, in part due to the lack of reflexivity and dialogue with social science scholarship. Hence, this section calls for new, interdisciplinary, and critical approaches to the study of intelligence. We invite contributions from across IR that challenge orthodox understandings, bring into view new actors, objects, targets, and sites of contemporary intelligence, or take a fresh look at intelligence services through perspectives centring on their professionals, practices, and violent effects.

Section Chairs: Andrew Palmer & Hilde van Meegdenburg

We cannot understand international relations without studying the stories that are told about them. It is in the stories that are told—before, during and after—that events and relations are shaped, rationalized and given meaning. This section is concerned with the role of narrative in international cooperation and conflict. By “narrative”, we mean a form of telling that selects, arranges and frames events in ways that produce cultural and political meaning. Such narratives are fundamentally unstable. Dominant and emergent narratives exist in perpetual contest making narrative a site where hegemony is both established and challenged, and where history is continuously (re-)written. It is a key means for political actors to interpret past and present, imagine possible futures, and construct a credible story of the self and the world. As such, narrative is fundamental to (collective) sense and decision-making and therefore fundamental to world politics, cooperation and conflict. This section provides a space to unpack the work that narrative does in making, perpetuating and ending conflict and cooperation. It is interdisciplinary and creates conversations between different traditions and perspectives. It embraces all subfields from traditional IR, history and psychology, to literary studies, gender and de-/postcolonial studies, memory and trauma studies, media studies, and more. We invite theoretical and methodological discussions as well as analyses of concrete narratives and applied case studies using a range of techniques: from process tracing to literary analysis, and from foci on narrative emplotment to work studying the narratives inherent in architecture, monuments, and commemorative rituals.

Section Chairs: Morgane Desoutter & Andréa Noël

Over the past decade there has been a growing community of scholars concerned with the ‘popular culture and world politics continuum’.  Framing the research agenda as a continuum implies popular culture and world politics are mutually implicated.  Some argue popular culture reflects world politics and so provides a novel entry point to research and teaching where, for example, Hollywood cinema is used to illustrate theoretical or conceptual arguments. Approaching popular culture as a continuum facilitates a far richer research agenda because it recognises popular culture constitutes world politics: popular culture is world politics.  However, world politics also conditions and constrains popular culture.  A surprisingly diverse community of scholars has built a foundational, transformative research programme that is complex, multifaceted, and which cuts across traditional divisions within International Studies. The Section would continue to focus on the emerging research programme of Popular Culture and World Politics, which continues to be one of the most innovative new research programmes in critical international studies. Many ECRs have invested in PCWP related sections and we will strive to continue to be an inclusive environment for ECRs, building on the diversity that characterizes the PCWP research community. In addition, it would invite panels with an explicitly pedagogical focus, as popular culture and world politics is entering the curriculum of universities across Europe and around the world, and so there is an appetite for a collective consideration of PCWP pedagogy.

Section Chairs: Joana Ricarte & Oscar Mateos

Peace Studies (PS) is an interdisciplinary field with a strong normative component headed towards understanding the root causes of conflict and the conditions for the promotion of peace. Notwithstanding recurrent warnings over the risks of co-optation, PS has expanded the thought and practice on peace to include bottom-up perspectives and everyday political claims into the international agenda, contributing to the incorporation of emancipatory views of peacemaking and the construction of localized policies.

This research-action bias places PS at the center of debates under the current crises with long-lasting global impact, namely the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the Israeli war agains Hamas and the overall growing tensions in the Middle East, the rise of extremism and exclusionary politics, the escalation of war-like narratives, the hardship of democracies, among others, which disrupt our understandings of conflict, identities, interventionism and peace(building). This rapidly changing international environment poses a need to reimagine Peace Studies in pluralistic ways beyond local/international boundaries and the north/south divide, repositioning the discipline into the forefront of events and their consequences.

This section aims to establish a network of scholars interested in developing critical research about peace, its meaning(s), forms of promotion and implications for a diverse range of actors. By taking stock of the advancements of the field and promoting agenda-setting debates within its most recent trends and beyond, the PS section will gather around 10 panels yearly to discuss peace-related dimensions including feminist agendas for peace, post/decolonial peace constructions, alternative and wider transitional justice mechanisms, the evolving international peace architecture and its consequences, as well as the ethnicization of peace.

Section Chairs: Melissa Johnston & Roberto Roccu

The section aims to develop a sustained research network of scholars working in and beyond International Studies to promote critical research on the global political economy. Grounded in recent calls to diversify the disciplinary focus of (International) Political Economy, the section will offer a home for scholars to study contemporary capitalism and its gendered and racialised operation at the global, local and household levels. The section aims to advance an explicitly “global” outlook for political economy research in contrast to the existing Eurocentric framework of IPE. To this end, we will prioritise and feature knowledge produced in and for the global South, and utilise the section as a means to design meaningful collaborations between scholars in the global South and North.

Section Chairs: Henrique Tavares Furtado & Sophia Hatzisavvidou

The recent rise of far-right and extreme-right parties and ideologies, from the relative abjection after 1945 to the stunning success during the 2024 EU parliament elections and Trump’s re-election, is undeniably one of the most pressing issues of our time. We propose an innovative standing section specifically devoted to the critical study of global reactionary politics (which does not exist in the present) as a means to provide a scholarly home for, and the means to integrate, individual scholars who have been working on the issue in IR. Since at least 2016, in the aftermath of Brexit and Trumps’ first government, political scientists, political theorists and IR scholars have copiously written about rising radical populist movements (Robin 2018; Jarvis 2022; Hillebrand 2019; Mudde 2019; Kinnvall and Svensson 2022; 2022; Finkelstein 2017; March 2017; Stavrakakis et al. 2018; W. Brown, Gordon, and Pensky 2018; Vaughan et al. 2024; Toros 2022; Meier 2022; Furtado 2018; K. Brown, Mondon, and Winter 2023). Drawing on the example of the Reactionary Politics Research Network (RPRN), we aim to invite contributions which focus on the unlikely alliances that make up the modern reactionary landscape from a marked intersectional perspective: how and why do disparate movements – ranging from TERFs to climate denialists, anti-vaxxers to neo-Nazis, reform voters to traditional conservatives and the political centre – join forces in political formations that have significant implications for the future of global democracy.

Section Chairs: Gustav Meibauer & Alex Reichwein

Realism is often still considered one of IR’s mainstream approaches. However, it also faces a dual challenge: firstly, realism is criticized as out-of-date, incapable of a positive vision that transcends the recurrence realists assume characterize the international. This is especially relevant in times of change, and as (seemingly) new challenges permeate policy and scholarly agendas, whether global warming, pandemics, populism, or terrorism. Secondly, realism has been argued to be tightly interwoven with Western-centric, elitist modes of knowledge production. Its critics suggest that realism’s disciplinary dominance has silenced alternative voices and eradicated historically divergent or marginal experiences. In this depiction, realism’s disciplinary role is not only undeserved, but downright detrimental.

And yet, the reemergence of great power rivalry, advances in military technology, and continued interstate competition have triggered renewed interest in realist analyses and prescriptions. Realist variants are increasingly employed and developed across the globe to better understand a wide range of historical and contemporary phenomena.

Against this background of theoretical, conceptual and disciplinary contestation, we invite submissions from all scholars who engage with the realist tradition, be they realists themselves, scholars of realist thought, or its critics. Papers, panels or roundtables could investigate, for example:

1) the genesis and roots of the realist tradition;

2) different realist approaches (e.g. classical realism, neorealism, realist constructivism, neoclassical realism, subaltern realism, etc.) and realist theorization (e.g. ontology, epistemology, methodology, causation, paradigmatic boundaries, concepts); including in terms of distinction/comparison to or complementarity with other theoretical approaches to IR/foreign policy;

3) realist theorizing of international politics and/or foreign policy, especially throwing new light at “traditionally realist” questions, specific actors’ policies (including beyond great powers and/or the Global North), or otherwise pushing realist approaches beyond their usual empirical scope;

4) the place of realist thought and analysis in the discipline, as well as its knowledge production and pedagogy;

5) realist visions and analyses of IR, and whether/how realism advances our understanding of contemporary/future challenges.

Section Chairs: Anders Wivel & Revecca Pedi

The aim of this section is to address the big questions in world politics from the perspective of small states. It seeks to gain in-depth knowledge about small states security in war and peace, their approaches in cooperation and conflict, their strategies of survival and influence, the interplay between the domestic and the external environment in the international relations of small states, their norms and practices in international politics. Its mission is to  provide a forum for a growing but fragmented field of study in the International Relations discipline and stimulate a research agenda in a field that despite recent steps forward remains largely repetitive and parochial. We invite papers and panels on any topic concerning the international relations of small states in Europe and beyond. We consider of particular interest studies exploring the strategies small states employ to respond to the changing nature of world politics and examining the vulnerabilities and opportunities small states are facing due to rising uncertainty in the international system. We welcome scholarship investigating the particularities of the international relations of small states and the lessons that can be learnt from the efforts of small states to successfully navigate a competitive world despite their limited resources. We encourage contributions by both senior and emerging scholars providing innovative theoretical and/or empirical insights. The section advances academic pluralism in theories and methodologies but also in terms of gender and geographical representation. 

Section Chairs: Rune Saugmann & Yoav Galai

Visual politics is a growing interdisciplinary field of academic research, political critique and aesthetic practice. It ranges from the analysis of visual artefacts, which are approached as repositories of meaning or political acts, to the interrogation of practices of vision and surveillance. Increasingly, visual international relations scholars embrace visual methods and produce visual artefacts as research, engaging in new practices of “visual writing.” Over the past three years, the standing section on visual politics has established itself as the premier venue for visual politics in IR and has helped to push the boundaries of what formats of publication IR can take. Numerous papers first presented at the EISA standing section have been published in leading journals, new research partnerships have been formed, and early career scholars have made the section their intellectual home and developed their work in continuous dialogue with European and International colleagues. The Visual politics section continues this work and stresses two things: First, to expand the emphasis on “visual writing” and making more generally, and to encourage discussions on both practice and pedagogy, embracing new technologies and welcoming work that draws on adjacent fields. Second, it explores the implication of visual politics with broader histories of visual oppression, aligning technological developments with oppressive visual discourses.

Section Chairs: Aleksandra Spalińska & Jochen Kleinschmidt 

International Relations (IR) discipline is based on the presumption that world politics is constituted by the international/domestic binary in which the international system is anarchical and the domestic realm is hierarchical. This presumption is challenged by the literature on functional differentiation and contestation, and state crisis (Cerny, 2023). Simultaneously, there is a growing literature on non-state actors (Charountaki and Irrera, 2022) and non-state contributions to state sovereignty (Srivastava, 2022). However, statism and essentially conceived state power continue to dominate IR (Rosenberg, 2023), contributing to the limits of IR ontology and marginalisation of non-state and societal dimensions of world politics in the study of IR. Standing section invites scholars to explore and discuss world politics beyond the state system through the lens of spaces, relations and struggles, addressing the questions of ‘where,’ ‘how’ and ‘what.’ Spaces (‘where?’) refer to the outside(s), frontiers, boundaries, liminal spaces, and ‘uncharted’ terrains beyond state power. Relations (‘how?’) embrace dynamics, developments, strategies and patterns of interactions and coexistence among state, non-state, and societal actors. Struggles (‘what?’) encompass conflict, collaboration, persistence, survival and securitisation. We welcome papers that study world politics beyond the state system through these questions, and their implications for IR. In particular, we are interested in mechanisms and practices that contest the anarchy of state system or the hierarchy of domestic realm. Moreover, we invite papers that advance approaches used to tackle statism in IR, such as heterarchy (Cerny, 2023) or societal multiplicity (Rosenberg, 2016). We welcome both theoretically and empirically oriented contributions.